Fortnightly Writing Competition -KING OF RANDOM (Results)

[Baron]

Have you ever seen those YouTube videos by Grant Thompson, a.k.a.

The King of Random?



Well, this topic has nothing to do with him, but enjoy learning how to smelt metal by taking apart a microwave.   But seriously folks, this competition is about a single, random event that suddenly turns a character's world on its head.  Maybe it's a regular day and then suddenly aliens invade, or a car drives through the living room wall, or a taco in a restaurant becomes sentient, or a character suddenly develops the telekinetic ability to trigger aneurysms in anyone he meets, or an AGS game your character is coding starts taking over entire swathes of the digital global financial system, or the bottom rusts out of an airplane, or a protagonist wins the lottery, or frogs that were sucked up by a tornado suddenly start raining down à  la Magnolia, or a pothole suddenly opens under a character's car and swallows the car and then the car and the character are transported to an ancient version of the same city but has been buried for millennia under debris and is now populated by blind albino ancients with grotesquely long ear hair and uncanny echo-location abilities.  So yeah, the topic is random.  Enjoy!

Deadline is Sunday April 10 at the close of business, which means I'll actually close the comp when I get back to my computer on the evening of the eleventh.

Successful entrants will be judged on the quality of their character, setting, plot, word-choice, and of course the creative aspect of their random event.  Happy writing!


 

[Danvzare]

Here you go, the most random story I could come up with. A rather disturbing one at that as well. Enjoy!


It was a beautiful summer morning and Jake Goodright was eager to get to work. Today was a special day for him because he just knew that he was going to get that promotion he had been longing for, for so many years now.

Jake was a rather average man; average height, average build, average intelligence. He was so average that many of his friends often forgot that he even existed. And it was this averageness that cemented the fact in Jake's mind that he was going to earn that promotion today. You see, the average amount of time it takes to get a promotion had passed, so if he got the promotion today he would remain the most average man in the world.

But something decidedly unaverage happened to Jake as walked down the street he always took to work. A crazy scientist with a poofy afro ran into him, screaming at the top of his voice “I've done it! I've done it!” “Done what?” Asked Jake, bewildered by the scientist's exclamation. “I finally managed to pass the kidney stone through my urethra!” Responded the mad scientist.

Jake rolled his yes, shook his head, stepped to the side, and proceeded to walk past the mad man. “Oh, that reminds me. I need a test subject.” Proclaimed the scientist, as he turned around and stabbed a syringe into Jake's neck. Jake's vision quickly became a blur as everything darkened around him. Suddenly Jake opened his eyes again, only to now find himself in a dark and dank room. In what felt like mere seconds had actually turned out to be days.

Jake was in a cage, in what appeared to be a dungeon. Around the dungeon was various lab equipment. The mad scientist was also there, tinkering away with some chemicals he had in glass vials. “What are you going to do to me?” Asked Jake, worry in his voice. “Oh nothing much, I just want to test out these two inventions of mine.”

The scientist quickly grabbed two glass containers, one full of a blue liquid, and the other full of a green liquid. “One of these vials will make you puke for the rest of your life!” Exclaimed the scientist. “And the other?” Asked Jake who was now desperately looking for a way to escape. “The other… I don't know. Maybe make you immortal. Let's find out!” The scientist then threw both containers at Jake, causing them to shatter on Jake's face.

“Ahhhh!” Screamed Jake, as he quickly took glass shards out of his face. But suddenly, he felt a churning sensation in his stomach, and without any control whatsoever, he hurled out a strange glowing green liquid. But he didn't stop hurling it out; it just kept going and going in a constant stream until finally the whole floor of the dungeon had a few inch deep pool of this strange glowing liquid. Jake tried in vain to say something, but the endless stream coming out of his mouth made it impossible.

“Oh don't fret, I'm sure you'll die soon. After all, you can't exactly breathe while puking.” Said the scientist nonchalantly. But Jake didn't die, and Jake didn't stop puking. The pool grew deeper and deeper until eventually the scientist, in all of his mad curiosity, decided to take a taste of the glowing green liquid coming out of Jake's mouth. He dipped his finger into the pool, and then placed his finger into his mouth. “Hmm, not bad.” He exclaimed shortly before hurling endlessly as well. Whatever that stuff was, it was infectious, and now both Jake and the scientist were puking this green stuff out for all eternity.

Slowly the liquid built up and spilled out of the dungeon and into the streets above. It went down the street, and into the sewers. It entered into entered the water supply, and began infecting many people. Soon the entire world was endlessly puking. Years passed and the earth became surrounded by the green glowing liquid as every living creature on it puked it out at a constant rate. Millennia passed, and the liquid had made its way to other solar systems, and was in turn infecting aliens. After nearly a million years, the entire universe was filled with this green goop.

Inside the universe filled with the green glowing liquid that made you create more of it for all eternity, was a final speck of hope. A spaceship with the last non-infected lifeforms in the entire universe. But the hull was weakening, and it wouldn't be long until they were infected too. They were working on a way to traverse dimensions, so as to escape their cruel fate.

Their dimensional jumper was nearly ready, but the ship's hull gave way mere moments before completion. Since it was their last chance, they activated what was finished, and hoped for the best. The ship suddenly disappeared, and a void was left in its place. A void which was quickly filled with the green liquid.

The unfinished dimensional jumper worked, but it had ripped the ship apart during the jump, leaving nothing but a single speck left floating in the cosmos of another universe.

The speck was tiny, almost microscopic. It was green, glowing, and a liquid. And it had just been spotted by a passing research spaceship that was eager to see what it was.

The end.

[Tournk]

oh god. That's terrible (in a good way ). But seriously, that was a good read, and I liked the ending.

[SilverSpook]

Now I know why I never get promotions.  They lead to vompocalypse.

[Baron]

Nice to see so much activity already.  But for the rest of you, we're halfway to the deadline, so get those computer keys tapping!

[Sinitrena]

Blue, blue, blue is all my food...

It all started with the colour blue. You know how there is food in nearly all colours available? There are red tomatoes, green peas, yellow corn. Meat can be red or brown or white and sure, with food colouring, blue food shouldn't be that strange, right? But when you wake up, bite in a delicious apple, look down and it is suddenly blue? Just the pulp and nothing else? Yeah, that is rather disconcerting.

I spat it out immediately. I mean, how would you react? Of course, my wife, Teresa, wasn't exactly happy with me. The half chewed pulp of an apple is slightly disgusting, even when it isn't blue, I would say.

Well, long story short, Teresa did not see that the apple was blue, I had lost my appetite for the morning and that was that for the moment. I mean, who thinks all that much about something like that when you're tired in the morning and stressed because you have the deadline of an important project at work looming? Yeah, I attributed it to stress and went about my day.

I can't remember what I ate for lunch that day, probably because I didn't notice anything unusual. When I came home later than usual that night â€" our project was a nightmare â€" Teresa slammed my plate down in front of me rather heavily. I must admit, I had neglected her quiet a bit in the last few days. So, I cut my â€" by now cold â€" steak in half and nearly choked on the sip of water I had just taken. The meat was blue, light blue. The shocked expression on my face must have been rather amusing, because Teresa broke out in maniacal laughter immediately. I did not find it all that funny but at least that meant she knew the reason my expression.

“Food colouring,” she choked out after a moment. When I didn't respond, still rather shocked, she added: “That was just too good to miss, you know.”

Well, we did prank each other occasionally, so I wasn't all that angry, but when my pancakes in the morning were also blue inside, I thought she had gone too far. Unfortunately, she had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. I didn't believe her then, but I know now that she told the truth. That morning I didn't and so we both left the house angry at each other.

And than it got really weird. The burger at lunch was also blue â€" the meat, the bun, even the lettuce had a slight blue shimmer to it. It felt a bit like the world had gone mad. I mean, why was everybody suddenly colouring their food? Was it a new trend? One of these hipster ideas? Or a festival invented by some businesses? But there was no advertising and â€" more disconcerting â€" nobody else seemed to notice anything. I was a bit wary to mention it to anyone. This couldn't be an elaborate prank, it wasn't a commercial gimmick and the fabric of the universe probably didn't change from one day to the other either. So there was probably something wrong with me.

I wasn't really sure what to do at first. It was obviously a problem, and a persistent one at that. Whatever I bought, whether it was raw or cooked, everything that would even marginally be considered food turned out to be blue. Even chocolate and, as I noticed when I tried to get drunk, beer. And it got stranger. The colour became stronger and stronger. After a few days it seemed to shine and I could see it through the skin as well.

Anyway, it spoilt my appetite. I just couldn't eat anymore. I tried a few times, even tried eating with closed eyes. That went about as well as you might imagine. When I got desperate, I went to one of those modern restaurants that offer their food in complete darkness to emulate the way blind people see the world. It didn't work. I saw the food shimmer in the darkness. Probably because I always thought about it.

I lost weight and I became quiet irritable. I fought with Teresa and when she suggested I go to my physician, I knew she was right. I didn't really want to go, but in the end I did.

As expected, Dr. Marlow sent me to a psychiatrist. After all, there can't be anything wrong with the body when all that changes colour is food and nothing else.

Well, I don't want to dwell too long on everything we talked about, but Dr. Abrams diagnosed an eating disorder, albeit an unusual one, due to stress at work and at home. Her idea for a therapy was for me to learn to eat again, basically ignoring what I was eating until I managed to deal with stress in a better way. She suggested talking therapy for that.

It made sense. It was a perfectly reasonable course of action, so of course it didn't work. I spent the next months having weekly therapy sessions and overcoming my disgust for blue food. Unfortunately, it didn't help. Sure, I somehow managed to eat and I did get better dealing with stress but my food stayed blue. And Dr. Abrams had absolutely no explanation for that â€" not for my persistence that the food stayed the same and not for the fact that I saw it as blue. Why blue of all colours? Why did my eating disorder have such a strange characteristic? We talked often about it. She often asked if I had a special connection with the colour blue but I could honestly say that there was absolutely nothing â€" no bad memories, no trauma, not even a children's story that had stuck in my head.

After a few months, Dr. Abrams told me she had read about a similar case in a psychology journal and asked for my permission to discuss my case with the author of the article. Of course I agreed. By that point I would have done nearly everything to see my food in normal colours again, especially because it was also beginning to become dangerous. You see, Teresa had gone to visit her sick mother for a few weeks, so I had to cook for myself. And it is really difficult to tell if food is rotten when one of your senses gives you completely wrong information.

So, to make this short, other psychiatrists also contacted the author and it turned out that there were about 700 known cases of my disorder in the world that all developed around the same time. We patients had nothing in common, really. We lived all over the world, there were male and female ones and everything in between, our skin colours differ, our ages too. We had different jobs, different social origins. Neurologists examined us, trying to find similarities in our brains but, in short, there was nothing connecting us except for the fact that all food turns blue for us. And no therapy was found. Nothing.

*

I lived like that for nearly ten years, visiting my psychiatrist weekly and meeting the other patients from time to time all around the world to talk about our condition and problems. But all in all, life went on as before.

That is, until two days ago when I heard a knock on my door. I opened it and the next thing I remember is me waking up in a large dormitory and everyone else with my condition there as well. I soon noticed some people who I had never met who also had the same condition but weren't part of our network.

Anyways, we are prisoners and our jailers turned out to be blue people of all things: blue skin, blue hair, even blue teeth, but otherwise human as far as we can tell. We nicknamed them blueies for obvious reasons, even though none of us really trusts their eyes when we see blue.

They told us they would take us with them but didn't answer any questions. I don't know where we are going or why. The favourite theory is that aliens abducted us for some reason but whether they marked us with our condition or chose us because of it, we do not know. Escape seems impossible.

I was just about to fill my printer with new paper when I heard the knock and so I still had paper in my hand when I opened the door. Some other people have pens. They didn't take anything from us and so we decided to gather as much information as possible and note it all down, just in case somebody finds it one day.

This closes the first report.

Sean Flannigan

Addendum: Sean forgot to mention that the food we receive through the ceiling of our prison is perfectly normal to our eyes, that is red and green and yellow and definitely not blue. We all have problems eating it.

Derek Lime

[Danvzare]

Wow, that was a really brilliant story and really piques my curiosity.
I kinda want to start sprouting theories now.

[Baron]

Two stories and two more days to go.  I know the official deadline is tomorrow, but I won't get around to starting the voting until approximately 48 hours from now, so get clicking those keys in a random kinda way! 

[SilverSpook]

I have something, might be in a bit late tomorrow if that's ok!

[Baron]

Well, let's close the competition Tuesday, just to be sure.   Good luck!

[Sane Co.]

Mable
I was surprised to see you at the store in town last week. Life can be random can't it? Thanks for letting me talk to you. It's been a while, 15 years hasn't it? While shuffling through my box, I came across this again, I thought you might like it back (don't worry, I scanned it).

A funny Story
By Mable

Wonce upon a time there was a jiant green meenee. Everybody was sacred of him and dint like him. he wood attak the twon and eat everybody up. They didnt like

the green meenee. The jiant was so tall as a building he coudnt fit through the door of his work, ware Daddy goes to leav me. He coudnt jump up and doun or he

wood destroy te tallest bilding. He was a sad meenee, but he was a verry nice meenee. He wood hold the door for the girls in the work, and wood mak

the boys hold the door for the girls and the ladybugs, so they cood fly and have very much fun. The only aminal nice to the meenee was the

elafant, the elafant was so tall he touch the top of dads hed. But my Dad is the tallest of the boys he can touch the top of the room and the sky.

But the ladybugs didnt lik the meenee, they eat ants and spiders and kiss you when they tickle. But the menee crushed them and was very sad.

They didnt like the meenee but i liked the meeenee and he was meen but he was nice and i liket him much and the meenee was you and the meenee was

sory but can we have a pleydet agen now befor i go to my new skool.

ps now throwning roks at ladybugs oh k?


Maybe we could set up that playdate sometime?
Nice Seeing You Again,
Sane Co

[Mandle]

OMG...over the spring holidays I had some young students in for a three-day extra-curricular event...and on the last day we studied "Green Eggs And Ham" as the subject matter...

I made said dish for the students (food colouring) and challenged them to try it, in a box and with a fox etc...

After which I let them go crazy with the materials, and they coloured mayonnaise purple and ketchup black, which we added to the green eggs and ham...And even made the parents try it later on...Who all grimaced as they ate it...I hadn't yet eaten much of the weirdly coloured food as I was too busy running the class, and thought everyone was just being silly...

During the class the kids had also coloured some potato salad bright blue, but time ran out so it ended up a leftover which I took home and ended up eating the next night as part of dinner...

After telling the kids over and over that the food tasted just the same despite the toxic colours and not to be silly, I actually found that it was very hard to put that bright blue potato salad in my mouth and actually eat it, and even when I did eat it, and it tasted exactly the same as always, I found that I was still not enjoying the food...

So yeah: weird coloured food sucks!

[Danvzare]

Mandle, when I first started reading that, I thought it was an entry. Until I got to the end, and I figured out you were telling a story that actually happened.

The whole "weird coloured food" thing, reminds me of something from when I was a kid. I remember shops selling ketchup that you could buy in an assortment of colours. Obviously it didn't catch on, because no one sells them anymore.
Though when I was younger, I always wondered what they tasted like (apparently they just tasted like normal bottles of ketchup), but now that I'm older, I'm always wondering what kind of idiot came up with that idea.

[Mandle]

Mandle, when I first started reading that, I thought it was an entry. Until I got to the end, and I figured out you were telling a story that actually happened.

Yeah...I was just talking about the coincidence between Sinitrena's story and my recent RL experience, which is a pretty random coincidence...So, in fact, in a meta kinda way, I guess it could be an entry?

That would be pretty random of me. Let's do it!

[SilverSpook]

It will be in shortly! 

[SilverSpook]

(Sorry in advance for the length, I should probably just blow this up into a novel or something lol.)



THE ARK


"I quit America.  I swear to God, I quit this fucking country," Noah said, tossing the spent popcorn bag of hydrogenated oil and Flavocol salt into the trash can, like a molotov cocktail hurled at a downtown megabank nexus.  He checked his Android phone, waiting for the dollars or the contracts or some guardian angel to fly in through the WiFi and save him from hell.  This HomeSweetHome.com thing, it was his Golden Ticket.  Show me the money, baby.   Tap tap.  The Kickstarter had three bottom-tier $100 donations, two of which were from his grandparents and one was his own money that he self-donated to make his venture not look like a failure.  Abysmal.  Fuck. 

"I can't believe they have *middle class pencil-factory workers* in Germany," Xina said, pouting her duckface photo-op pout that had become her real-pout.  "And, and, FREE COLLEGE in like, what, half of Europe?  I've got a PhD-and-a-half in computer science, political science, and psychology, but I still have to shake my ass on the internet for cash 'cause my Jamba Juice wage-slavery covers what... the INTEREST on my debt?" Xina performed her expert twerking in her over-tight yoga-pants and micro-top.  She'd gymmed that butt real hard, got it from flat-Anglo-Nordic nonexistance to a near-Kardashian level bump.  Hard working American, Xina.

Noah helped her Instagram a five-second video and hash tagged it #fitnessmotivation #datass.

Xina stole her phone back, "Wait!  Don't forget to tag it,' #BernBabyBern'.  I don't want to be the French-curl spotter for entitled Hilary-bitch clients."

"Ok.  How about #Trump too?  Nobody sees or hears anything that doesn't have The Donald in it," Noah suggested, as Xina's personal marketing thinktank.

"Pro-Trump or anti-Trump?" Xina asked, switching to squats and checking her fitPal on her watch. 

Noah circled his index like a wheel of fortune, waiting for Xina's verdict. "Either, both, doesn't matter.   It's what CNN, MSNBC, Fox, mainstream journalism and social media all have in common- Trumps got the network locked in, and trying to not talk about Trump is like trying to quit the internet.  Opting out of the Donald's flame war has the opportunity cost of being made irrelevant.  I mean the guy is a circus clown and I hate everything he stands for, but props for brilliant strategy."

"Ooh it gets me so hot when you talk wonky biz-speak to me.  You're such a capitalist mastermind," Xina did a duckface-sneer and punched Noah on the shoulder with proper Gina Carano form and it fucking hurt.  But Noah didn't say or make a face to avoid looking like a little bitch of a man.

Tap tap tap.

#fitnessmotivation #datass #Trump #AntiTrump. 

"Speaking of ventures..." Noah reached into the back pocket of his jeans' ass pocket to find it flat and bony and phoneless.  "Uh, shit."  He repeatedly touched all the pockets on him like a netgen tweaker's Macarena, "Shit, where's my phone?  Xina?  Where's my phone?  Xina!  My phone?  I'm waiting for important contacts!"

"Noah, I'm doing my Zumba squats here, ok?  Flash-workout.  Maybe you left it in the theater?" Xina continued bending over on the street corner.

"No!  No way, I distinctly checked the floor... Aw shit," he slapped his forehead with a greasy popcorn hand and immediately wiped it off with a parking receipt to avoid blemishing before tomorrow's sharktank startup pitch.  "I must've thrown it out in the popcorn bag.  Fuck!" 

"Jeeze, playboy, you don't have to get all worked up about it!  I'll run back and grab it for you.  I've got to get some more cardio in.  Can you make sure this post gets to Tumblr, Facebook, and like, whatever other sosh-media site looks trendy right now?  You're a super-guy, babe!  Thanks!"  Xina ran off in the direction of the theater.  Noah watched her black lycra disappear behind sliding glass panes.  She was looking good for 32.  Maybe not doing so good, though.  Then he remembered he was 33.  Fuck.

Noah called his parents up, "Yeah mom, we'll be home in half an hour.  Sorry, our cut of the rent will have to wait till like... uh.  Yeah, I understand mom.  I know, I just feel bad because...  Yeah, ok.  I love you too, mom."  Noah popped open TaskRabbit App -- there was a grocery errand but his arthritis was going to pre-empt that and he was trying to sell his nascent-Zuckerbergian success-image to Xina.  Asking her to do sharing-economy peasant-jobs for him to pay his rent was off-message. 

Noah tried Uber, but his 1995 pre-historic antifreeze sputtering Toyota DX had expired insurance and was a decade too old for ridesharing.  No funding to be gathered there.  So Noah sucked it up and yelped the nearest Payday Loans place in the area code.

"Hey, Xina, we gotta head to Chinatown real quick..." she came back doing some kind of interpretive jumping jacks or was that aerial Pilates?

"Yeah!  Let's hit it.  Oh my gosh you are a marketing genius, Noah Crowe!  22 likes and seven reblogs in," she checked her cracked fitWatch, "One minute thirty four seconds!" 

"Sorry, half the comments appear to be Thrsty ass-creepers who want to toss your salad," Noah lamented sheepishly.

"Hey, pervs are cost-of-doing business.  Besides I can sell prints on my tasteful art-porn site.  'Fit Wonderwoman' sales paid my soy machiatto bill last month.  Cash in hand, bitch," she smirked and hugged him.  "Forget about that and take my 'marketing genius' compliment.  You are GOOD at this internet stuff, people will figure it out sooner or later."

She hugged him with her fit sweat-glowing body that was probably about as muscular and less asthma addled than his own.  Noah felt his weak heart speed up, although it had as much to do with the way Xina called him 'genius' without the irony or air quotes than any physical evolutionary mating-fitness thing.

Noah Crowe was her pet name for him, which Xina had knighted him coming out of Darren Aronofsky's biblical masterpiece of a film, starring Russel Crowe.  Noah had liked the computer-generated rock-giant Nephilim beating back hordes of filthy industrial Cain-followers to let onto his ark the chosen pairs of giraffes and pythons and cockateils and other life forms deemed worth saving. 

"You're like a genius, less-assholish Russel Crowe!" She'd said, hugging him this same girlfriendish way, albeit with 4% more bodyfat and an adjunct professorship at NYU at the time, that had fizzled.  Noah thought a more accurate description of himself would've been, "Less-muscular, less-handsome, less-rich, less-famous, but definitely way smarter Russel Crowe."   

Noah definitely felt he deserved awards of some sort for his coding work. 

Noah thought to himself that he would be smarter than to piss off Academy Insiders if he ever had the chance at an Oscar. 

***

Next morning Noah's phone ass-buzzed him out of a dream where he was the Tom Haverford, the Indian serial-entrepreneur from Parks And Recreation, in a zero-G Jacuzzi surrounded by supermodel cosplayers of Harley Quinn and Psylocke.  Noah's Galaxy S5 that he stole from his last JP Morgan intern-job-bullshit-actually-nonjob cracked under the bony pressure of his ass as he rolled over.

"FUCK!"  Noah Googled self-screen-fixing then X'd out after seeing the repair kit prices.  He'd remembered a 'free phone for signup' sign at an Obamacare registration in the Korean church on 5th, mental-noted to drop in.  He cut his index finger unlocking the phone's shattered glass, said 'fuck' again, sucked his finger, and squinted to read through the spiderweb fracture.

@TheRealXina: "Hey bitch, are you going to that Bernie caucus tomorrow?  These 200k student loans aren't going to forgive themselves!" It was Xina, of course.

Noah definitely felt he deserved awards for his coding work.  He'd banged out a couple capital-'I' indie games with a college roommate at Cal Tech that featured little transgender gnolls fighting and outwitting big jock-ish knights with huge maces.  It got high-crit praise from PC Gamer, as 'Important Game-Culture Satire'.  The Social Justice Armies and Tumblrinas used it to trumpet Diversity in Gaming.  But ultimately Noah's game, 'Mob's Hustle' was sidelined at E3, crucified on the altar of manly RPG combat by Reddit and Kotaku crusaders.  Noah's friend, and co-developer turned not-surprisingly out to be transgender, and he remembered Facebook stalking 'Jenna' (formerly James) on his friendslist one afternoon to discover she'd since been fired from Sonivision after a targeted Manosphere internet smear campaign.  The attack involved accusing Jenna of felating the AAA studio's CEO, along with being a traitor to 'real gamers', which was euphemism for, 'being a successful female with a gaming job.'

This is what you get when you try to do nice things.  This is what you get when you try to change things.  You can't save everyone.  You can't save everyone, Noah.

I think I'll skip the Bernie Sanders thing.

Noah grabbed one of Xina's thongs from the bedstand and wrapped it around his finger for a bandaid.   They'd usually fuck again in the morning but Xina had an ass-blaster client to personal-train at the gym and TaskRabbit groceries to deliver.  Noah snapped out of the thong-inspired reverie and began thumbing out a return text.

@DatNoahTho: "Hey, that Sanders rally sounds great but I got my big pitch today.  The CEO of Google might be in the room, and I hear he goes to these TedX things JUST to browse through hot undiscovered talent, like me.  It's like getting facetime with Jesus Christ."

@TheRealXina: "Oh, uh, right!  Let me know how getting facefucked by Jesus goes."

@TheRealXina: "Oooh...  I meant 'facetimed'!  Damned autocorrect!  (Kind of.  Not really.  I meant it.)

@DatNoahTho: "Ha ha.  Don't be a jellybelly cause I'm going to make those David Schwimmer millions soon, once the big Page takes me under his wing.  G5, baby, that's me all ballin' n' shit!"

WiFi silence. 

Noah started putting clothes on.  Picked up the phone.

@DatNoahTho: "Hey, make sure to pick me up a sticker and I'll be sure to online-vote for #FeelTheBern later."

@TheRealXina: "Caucusing doesn't work that way, you dildo!  I'm standing between an unemployed male nurse who won't stop hitting on me and a dreadlocked Women's Studies major who won't stop airing out her dissertation on trigger warnings and trying to get me to retweet her GoFundMe campaign to pay her rent.  It's kind of irras, but I'm doing my democratic duty.  You have to show face, you know?  Participate in fighting the plight of the proletariat?"

@DatNoahTho: "Ok, comrade commie, you're the one with the poli-sci PhD, you fight that good fight.  You just gave me an idea though: I'm going to side-pitch to Larry Page my voting-app that will solve all of this inefficient democratic process crap."

@TheRealXina: "Oh great, so Siri or Cortana or Google is going to tell us who we want to vote for now.  Like we haven't outsourced enough of our frontal lobes to our gadgets."

@DatNoahTho: "You're the one listens to her watch tell her when to squat, when to have a local-sourced hummus cracker bathed in non-GMO peanut butter.  Progress is a bitch.  Have fun with your male nurse / dreadlock-lesbian ménage a trios; I'm all open source, open relationships.  It's cool.  Just sext me pics for my jerk-off sesh after my big meeting."

@TheRealXina: "I'm actually not finding that joke very funny right now?  Go get facefucked by Zuckerberg.  Gotta airplane-mode my phone now, low-battery."

It's not Mark  Zuckerberg it's Larry Page! 

Aw, fuck.  As Noah shaved, brushed his teeth, he felt his inner-Ryan Gosling attempting to spin a solid apology speech already.  "Girl, I was an idiot, ok?" Godiva roses (cheap knock-off ones), home-made carbonara gluten-free pasta, a pre-written fitness tweet just waiting for Xina's Brazilian-ass-competitor pose sure to garner her a hundred likes and personal training clients.

Not now.  Shark tank time!  Shark tank!  Gotta sell yourself!

Noah switched off inner-Ryan Gosling and turned on inner-Jesse Eisenberg.  He turned to face the mirror and tried not to see a less-attractive, asthmatic loser-version of Russell Crowe.  A pasty stick-person loser version of Russell Crowe with no money, a terrible resume filled with random temp-work and three failed startup ventures, sharing a shit studio apartment with his parents in a Micronesian ghetto in some crumbling American metropolis, no future, turning 34 soon, who would probably be of no real value to society ever and would probably have committed suicide already if not for his unexplainably supportive and attractive girlfriend. 

34, but already with stress-created crow's feet, that were pinching inward.  The hurt quaver at the corners of his mouth started, next to the cold sore-looking rash that Noah prayed would just go away.   He felt the tears coming.

Noah focused on an image of Jesse Eisenberg's Lex Luthor and projected as loud as he could muster to his reflection, "Mr. Page!  Sir!  Just a second of your time.  Forget those tacky Jeff Goldblum Apartment.com ads... the HomeSweetHome App- it's going to revolutionize the way we do real estate, the way we do everything.  Great TED Talk, by the way, sir.  Truly inspiring." 

"Noah!  Breakfast is ready!" A sing songy voice sing-songed up to him and made him feel bad, made him feel like a kid, like it always did.  Killed his Eisenberg entrepreneur vibe.

"Uh, coming mom, one sec!"

"Big day, honey?" His mom asked, she'd taken off her Wal Mart night-shift getup and already had on her McDonald's uniform.  Side bonus was she knew how to make McDonald's hash browns now. 

***

Noah's mom always said that was what killed his dad, hash browns.  Artery cloggers.  But Noah knew it wasn't that.  It wasn't even necessarily the alcohol depression-spiral after the plant shutdown and the shipping job dried up when Amazon said they were going to do all their warehouse work with robots.   Dad died officially of heart failure at a Trump rally.  Noah had tried to debate his father, a blue-collar man's man.  Tried to talk him out of it, told him Trump was a liar and a sociopathic narcissist who would bring about World War III if not apocalypse.

"When are you gonna grow up, move out, stop playing with your kiddie computer games and get a real man's job?" Dad had said, before putting on his biker jacket, starting up his rusty old Harley, and riding off, unemployed, to a stadium full of similarly angry, emasculated white men made obsolete by technology and globalization. 

Noah burned up inside, at the comment.  Felt his blood pressure going through the roof.   Felt like the genius gnoll, about to outsmart the dumb knight on his 1450 cc steed, with some erudite, historically and statistically-grounded comeback about the futility of his father's outdated worldview.  But Noah decided against it.  Waste of breath.

And that was the last thing his father ever said to Noah.   

The ER doctor said he'd suffered massive cardiac arrest.  Everything all at once.  It was like all the arterial stints and pacemakers and daily handfuls of pharmaceutical just weren't enough to give the heart something that it really needed.  He was DOA.  Dad just fell off his wild hog Harley and gave up. 

Quit this fucking country, this world.

You can't save everyone.

 
Mom had CNN blasting at deaf-old-lady decibels, as it eternally was.  Geriatric, pro-Hillary, insider talking heads reading billionaire-written teleprompters.  Segwaying from election horseshit to ISIS bombings to an Economist study handwringing how 47% of jobs would be automated by computers and AI in two decades.  Noah turned it off.

"Noah-"

"Jesus, mom, I can't hear myself talk let alone you!  Can you make that ear appointment like I asked?" Noah said.  His mom banged some dishes around but didn't reply.

"Anyways, yeah.  It's a real big day!  Big startup opportunity- I'm 80% sure I'm going to score some facetime with one of the biggest moguls in-" Noah stopped when he saw mom's face glazing over.

"That's great, honey!  Make sure they give you enough for rent, and sick leave and vacation this time!" Mom said.  Noah felt his crows feet twitching to the sad place.  She's a boomer.  She doesn't know those things don't exist anymore.  She doesn't know any better.

"Yeah, I'll uh, negotiate hard, mom!"

"These people, I tell you.  They just don't know how special you are.  You're a genius with those computers and one day, they'll all know it," Noah's mom said, bringing over a perfect plate of happy-to-see-you eggs-n-bacy, and McDonald's-accurate hash browns. 

Noah smiled.  "Yeah.  Yeah they will, mom."

Noah wasn't going to quit.  Not just yet.

Through the paper-thin walls Noah could hear the choirs of the Micronesian Church singing over their Casio-keyboard, like they always did before working in the mechanically separated chicken plant all day on Sunday.  Noah could smell the methamphetamine byproducts coming from the flat next door.  Someone might've died upstairs, or maybe that was just rusty water from leaky pipes.

You can't save everyone. 

Time To Build Your Ark, man.


@DatNoahTho: "Jenna where the hell are you, Ted Talk is in 20 min."  Noah messaged her.  The fourth text in ten minutes.

Noah had already crunched through a box and a half of Powermint tic-tacs, and was washing them down with his third Rockstar Silver Ice.  On the verge of a nervous breakdown.  He HAD to make this conference.  On top of meeting his friend who had changed genders since their last face-2-face encounter.

"My concept HomeSweetHome.com is not just a business; its longterm goals mark a restructuring of the nature of real estate itself.  It will revolutionize... will mark a paradigm shift on par with the internet-"

Noah drilled his elevator pitch, pacing up and down the street corner where a bookstore, café, and rave venue had been converted into 4x10 coffin-housing pods in response to $5,000 / month rent.  On sidewalks, parking lots, a moss of tents filled with thousands of aspiring entrepreneurs, hunching over their laptops in trash-strewn streets waiting for their hot ticket into some Palo Alto nerd-Elysium like Googleplex.  Noah watched some tweaker kid from Mississippi eating cold sphagetti-ohs from a can demo a hacked Lego robot controlled by a VR headset that he said could build a dog house by itself.  It got three boards up before it fired a compressed-air nail gun into a Honda Civic's tire.  The tire was already flat, but a girl that was taking a baby-wipe bath in the car gave robot-boy the finger.   She kicked the Civic's rusty door off its hinges and caught a shuttle to work while hollering back insults in Punjabi.

"I'm *this* close, man," said robot boy, cyanosis sleep-deprived eyes sunk in the sharp cheekbones of malnutrition below the red forehead imprint of virtual-reality-headset-face.  "I just need the startup capital.  You think Uber is big displacing taxis and truck drivers and stuff?  Just wait till MY construction bots displace every carpenter, cement-layer and painter in the world.  We're talking TRILLIONS.  Disruption on a massive scale," the kid made the universal sign for money.

"Interesting.  Don't bring up the fact your tech is going to get rid of construction jobs though when you try selling it to the government types or the public at large or they'll burn you at the stake.  Propagate first, monetize later." Noah did a couple jumping jacks to get the caffeine and smart-drugs flowing. WHERE THE FUCK IS SHE?!

A self-driving Lexus limo pulled along the curbside at last, and self-opened its door, Back-To-The-Future style.  The limo looked like it was worth eight figures and came through a time warp from the future.

"Get in, you big dork," said a voice Noah recognized as the other half of his long-defunct game company, James Chen, but feminized by eighteen months of estrogen pills. 

The interior of the auto-limo looked and felt like the stuff of King robes and Pope cloaks.  Ermine?  Jenna was in a blue designer cheongsam with emerald cranes fastening two jet-black, perfectly crafted buns.  Like Chun Li, if she got upgraded from Brazilian butt-building fitness instructor and Bernie-supporter to marketing VP of Sonivision. 

His friend was loaded.  My Friend Is Loaded! Noah felt his inner-Eisenberg's business gears turning.  My friend is also hot...

"Can you stop staring?  Don't make this weird, Noah.  I'm just trying to return a favor," James- ah, Jenna said. 

Noah gulped.  They hadn't been DMing so much of late, Noah being so busy with HomeSweetHome and dealing with poverty and all.  But he'd gathered from the occasional Facebook update that his partner had been disgraced at Sonivision and made a GamerGate pariah.  Noah thus assumed Jenna would be in not-so-hot financial straits, maybe living off a AAA-game company severance bonus.  Maybe had extra tickets to the VIP part of the Ted Talk won in an unboxing raffle -- Jenna had her own makeup tutorial / cosplay channel.  Microcelebrity money, maybe enough for Oakland-outskirt rent, with a roommate.  Noah had pictured them rolling up to a San Fran Tech Conference in a 2000 Ford Taurus or a five-year old Audi, at best.  *Nothing* like this.

"Yeah, it's just, you know.  I had no idea you'd done this well for yourself and I mean I saw you in the profile pic and all, but you know.  It is a little weird to see your old art director with.  Boobs!" Noah gulped.  What the hell are you saying!  You sound like a pubescent paint-eating 7th grader on weed!  Stop screwing up and get your game on!  Noah had been planning to pitch his ideas to a Tech Giant head, not his former partner-turned-mogul / hot Street Fighter character.  Noah felt mental glaciers melting under the cognitive dissonance, icebergs of personality and dossier calving and reforming, like databases integrating.  James- Jenna.  Girl = true; Hot = true;  Rich = true;
 
Come on Ritalin, DO YOUR JOB and straighten my head the fuck out!

"You look great, Jenna, seriously.  Caitlyn Jenner has nothing on you.  I mean, shit.  All of this?  How?"

Jenna's obvious fortune in quality non-botox plastic surgery pulled into a devilish model-smile. 

"Long story, but basically, after the male-dominated game industry crucified me and got me fired, I drank myself unconscious and was dead for three days in the tomb of post-party rehab.  Then I ascended into the female/LGBT-dominated game/tech industry.  You know there are actually more female than male gamers?  Now I get paid several hundred thousand / hour to give a speech promoting gender/ethnic diversity for Silicon Valley Big Leagues.  Drink?"  Jenna waved sapphire-crusted nails toward the bar, illuminated by blue neon, filled with crystal and expensive oval-shaped vials of imported liqueur.  The money-ness of it intimidated the fuck out of Noah. 

"I recommend the 1888 Samalens Vieille Relique, which I need Google Translate to pronounce, lol," Jenna giggled in a self-deprecating way that Noah recognized through the vocal octave-shift and millionaire-ess bling as his old roommate, James.  It put him at ease.

"Sure, I'll try it out.  Do you mind if I take a #yolo-selfie with the bottle and you cool people to lord it up over my friends?" Noah joked, and Jenna giggled some more, which made the group selfie look like they were drunk-partying and having a blast.

A robotic bartender consisting of a Dead Maus-like DJ helmet and state-of-the-art force feedback manipulators like iRobot arms began mixing something Noah selected from a drink menu.  The alabaster machine arms even did a few bottle tricks from Coyote Ugly.

(Continued in next post)

[SilverSpook]

(Part 2)

There was a neckless black guy in a suit like an African American Dwayne Johnson that kept talking into an earpiece. 
There was also a dreadlocked white artgirl in some Bohemian skirtage and tessellated octagonal shoulder poofs that had that burnt-caramel smell of fresh 3D printing.  The way she was draping her limbs over Jenna, Noah assumed she was the girlfriend.

"This is my girlfriend and wardrobe director, Sheila.  Funny story- we met on set of a SyFy channel Face Off episode shoot -- which she won (bitch).  Sheila was also a major player on the Cosplay Heroes show," Jenna said.

"Jenna's still salty about losing to my post-apocalyptic cyborg mermaid getup," Sheila tickled the back of Jenna's neck.  God, they were so grossly cute!  It seemed so fucking fun to be rich!

"Anyway, it's great to finally meet *the* Noah Eisenstein, who helped Jenna get her big break with, 'Mob's Revenge'," Sheila said, turning back and taking a sip from a literally glowing-green drink in a glass shaped like a vertical moebius strip that had to be 3D printed out of quartz or something.  Like something Predator-aliens might drink, if they were in the 0.1%.

"Hey, it was all Jenna.  She was like Rembrandt with Photoshop.  The gnoll designs on our game were next-level, I mean the sheer amount of emotion Jenna could coax out of simple 2D sprites -- unprecedented.  The great Tim Schafer even gave the art design honorable mentions," Noah smiled, blowing helium into his rich hot friend's ego.  Jenna's Chun Li smile signaled it was working.

"Don't sell yourself short, Noah.  All my pretty pictures wouldn't've gotten me further than DeviantArt shout-outs and the occasional internet art-jam win without your game concept.  You wrote the script and the code- it was your brainchild.  An RPG without combat, that had *serious* gameplay mechanics?  Genius," Jenna sucked Noah's ego off.  No no no, no mental images of your hot transgender friend sucking you off.  Ew, what!?

"Well, I think if the critics hadn't been stacked on the overly 'male-gamer' purist end of the spectrum, the David-and-Goliath concept might've made a bigger splash," Noah admitted.   The robotic bartender finished mixing up a cocktail the touchscreen called, "The Most Interesting Man In The World," and handed it to Noah.  Noah wasn't a big drinker, but Skyy Blue vodka from 711 was the pinnacle of his price range.  This drink didn't even taste like alcohol- it was like having your tastebuds surgically replaced by nanotechnological sensors delivering little orgasms to your new cyborg brain, like hyper-evolved tetrachromacy of the tongue. 

"Wow, this is literally amazing," Noah reeled from the experience.

"I know, right?  It uses olfactory gastro-something... taste algorithms, to like, mix the perfect drink.  I don't know exactly how 'Louis' works," Jenna said.  Noah thought it was cute they'd named their robot drink mixer.

"Big data applied to the palette, no I get it.  I hear it's big in Japan already," Noah said.  Bye bye, human bartenders.

"Should we tell him?  I think we totally should, it's right up his alley," Sheila nudged Jenna.

"I don't know, DARPA and those Google guys had us sign those NDAs and stuff... But... who's gonna know right?"  Jenna said to Sheila, then turned back to Noah, "You think that bartender is cool?  Check this out," Jenna leaned over and slapped the giant black secret-service looking guy in the face.

"Woah, uh, what?" Noah put his hands up instinctively, then noticed the security hadn't flinched an iota.  Just kept sitting there, occasionally mouthing something into the coiled 'Agent Smith' wire in his ear.  Jenna slapped him again, harder.  Nothing.  The security's shades shifted slightly on his face.  Two seconds later, he reached up to re-center them.

"No way," Noah said picking his jaw up off the floor.  "No frickin' way."

"See?  I told you!  Look at his face!" Sheila took a candid and Instagrammed a gif of Noah's amaze-face.  Noah noticed her phone's onyx case had the same impossible octagon pattern as her 3D printed runway outfit.

"It's apparently super hush-hush right now, but yeah.  Our 'bodyguard' is a beta test of a future humanoid security bot.  Based on something called Attila... Amos..."

"Atlas.  DARPA's anthro-robot," Noah corrected, "Yeah, I wrote a thesis on it in college.  I had no idea they were already at this stage..."  Noah thought of that broke-ass nerd-loser squatting in a cardboard box in some crumbling American Metropolis, with his cold sphagetti-ohs and his duck tape and glue gun, building his little Lego construction-robot prototype, praying some hot rich person would 'discover' him.  Praying there, for years, with the millions and millions of other undiscovered nerds in coffins and ghettos and cardboard boxes, waiting for that one-in-a-million lottery ticket.  Noah thought of his tiny bank account, his tiny flat, Xina with her three-hundred grand student debt twerking on the street corner, his mom chain-working 16 hours a day at McDs and Wal Mart.  Looked at this DARPA android about to steamroll millions of security guards, clerks, waitresses into the mass-grave of human obsolescence.

You can't save everyone.

Time to build your motherfucking ark, bitch.

***

The Ted Talk thing was so much better than watching Youtube clips of it from McDonald's WiFi.

There were hordes of reporters, being held back by (Android?) security guards when Noah got out of the limo with his hot rich famous friends.  Noah had a brief near-epilepsy fit from all the flashes and the buzz of paparazzi drones. 

"Come on, get up here, silly!"  Jenna put an arm around Noah's back and brought him up into the frame on the red carpet.  "Just pretend like you're our date here, ok!" Holy shit, I'm a date for an Important Person!

Noah thought he might run out of cloud-space with all the group selfies he'd taken with Important People and non-micro celebrities at the conference.  Real, TV-famous celebrities and like politicians and stuff- he'd even gotten an Instagram of himself with George Clooney mocking Michael Keaton's Batman.  Larry Page wasn't there, but a second-in command at Google was, and Noah had pulled his pitch off expertly. 

"HomeSweetHome.com is not just a business; its long-term goals mark a restructuring of the nature of real estate itself.  We're talking Air BnB-writ-large. A revolution on par with the internet.  I just need the startup capital.  You think Uber is big, displacing taxis and truck drivers and stuff?  Just wait till my construction bots displace every carpenter, cement-layer and painter in the world.  I've got proof-of-concept,"  Noah felt some twinge of conscience, his inner-Eisenberg already throwing together Lego Robot Boy's idea into his pitch.  Was that stealing?  That's not like, a thing nowadays, though, right?  Stealing?  Noah temp-worked at a megabank, their whole business model was stealing!  Heads of state like Prime Minister of the UK was stealing!  Who cares, details!  We're gonna be rich- I mean build that ark!

"That's great work, Noah.  Here's my e-card.  We'll be in contact," Noah felt the balloon in his head swelling huge, every time he heard that phrase, 'That's great work.'  He heard that phrase several times. 

Noah always felt he deserved awards of some sort for his coding work. 

In his suit, with the millionare-ess supermodel-looking cosplayers on either side of him, owning the red carpet in full-Eisenberg mode, up in the VIP lounge, tossing back expensive champagne with other important people being defended by burly FBI-looking bodyguards, Noah felt like he'd already won some type of Academy Award. 

Maybe that's what winning an award takes- just being in the right place with the right people and looking like you deserve an award?  Nah, it's probably my genius and talent.

The TED Talk was a blast -- demos of everything from microbots like the cloud-machines in Big Hero 6 to Internet of Things talks about a future of your smart oven talking to your smart watch talking to your smart car synergistically be your personal healthcare/nutritionist/secretary/chauffer.  Jenna herself garnered standing ovations for her keynote on the coming gender identity revolution and Transhuman Age when people would be freed from the 'prison of the flesh', free to redefine themselves in the physical world as easily as we change our internet avatars.

Noah listened from the VIP booth next to Sheila who was on her polyhedron-phone, already done a costume change: swapped the white-dreads (a wig) for a gender-neutral side-buzz and a holographic David Bowie-esque rainbow suit.  He looked over to see a California municipal official, an older cis white man who looked confused and powerless and terrified out of his old-school bureaucrat suit.

"Jesus, I'm already fighting a PR war with this LGBT bathrooms thing and our schools are going under from this online education upsurge.  This is insanity," Noah heard the guy say.  Maybe it was to Noah, maybe it was to himself.

Noah saw his dad there, in the old guy, in the old white Clint-Eastwood wrinkles.  Man's man.  Noah imagined his father had been in a 'prison of his own flesh'.  Trapped in an outdated idea of a solid paycheck for a hard day's work, backyard grills and motorcycles and a pension.  Stockholm syndrome to outdated ways of being, unable to 'redefine themselves'.  Maybe some people couldn't, wouldn't change.  Had to fall off their steeds and just have a heart attack and die.  Natural selection.

You can't save everyone.

***.


Noah stood atop an ark, a massive boat, made of glass and steel girder.  Like  several TransAmerica Pyramid skyscrapers stacked horizontally.  The ark's hull was reflective crystal that shone like sapphire.  Noah wore a golden VR headset, waved his hands and trillions of swarming Lego-bots like hyper-sonic ants assembled the unfinished parts of Noah's ark.

Noah's wife came to his side, and she was played by Jenna, remarkably resembling Jennifer Connelly, in her biblical brown robes.  Naameh-Jenna put her arms around Noah's waist, just as a heavenly host of angels flew down, and they were angel-drones, with wings of segmented chrome, who took red carpet-photos of Noah and his transgender wife.  Even in her emaciation and tattered Arabian rags, Jenna was hot.

Thunderstorms gathered, with time-lapse speed and impossible density.  The rain began, slow at first.  Noah felt the droplets on his face, on his hands.  He looked down, and the droplets were little blue zeroes and ones.  Bits of data, at first just a drizzle, then coming exponentially faster, till they deluged the land.  In the ark, Noah had stored pairs of all living things: two giraffes, two cockateils, two pythons: they were protected.  But outside was the city, some collapsing American necropolis, and it was filled with millions upon millions of people, protesting in the streets.  Carrying signs and pitchforks and machine guns and Molotov cocktails, screaming at Noah to let them in as thunder struck and the digital rain became an unending torrent.  Police officers fired their weapons.  Construction crews and firemen overturned cars.  Doctors and nurses tended to injured middle-managers.  Lawyers and politicians tried to negotiate with megaphones.  Teachers and professors held up photos of their children, asking Noah to think of what would be lost.  Begging Noah to let them on his ark.

Noah did not, for there was not room.

Then the storm drains overflowed, and digital flood began to fill the streets.  Waves upon waves.  Noah covered his ears so as not to hear the wails of the sad souls as they drowned by the thousand.  They climbed up onto cars, and buses, but all were washed away.  They scaled buildings, clawed over each other tooth-and-nail to get to the roof tops, believing they'd reached safety.  But, inevitably, the waters rose, washing them all away like so many ants.  At last, the waters reached Noah's ark, and he was lifted, high above the waves.

Then Noah was in Methuselah's Mountain, sharing powermint tic-tacs with his father, who sat upon his motorcycle, and remarkably resembled Anthony Hopkins.

"You know why I have come?" Noah said.

"Yes, if man continued his ways, The Creator would annihilate this world,"  Noah's father-Hopkins said, coughing and pounding at his chest.

"So what I saw is true?  All life blotted out because what man has done?  Can it not be averted?" Noah said, removing his virtual-reality mask and rushing over to steady his father.   His fathered continued hacking, clutching at his chest desperately now, face turning bright red.  Noah caught him, just as his father fell off the seat of the Harley, laying him on the ground.

"I have been to the other side, Noah.  I see what I was too blind to see in life, my son," Noah's father's eyes became bloodshot, his breathing slowing as his life slowly drained away.  "You were right, about the Trump... Fire consumes all.  But water cleanses, separates the foul from the pure.  The future, from the past."  His once-strong, construction-calloused, man's man hands were weak now as they picked up Noah's golden VR headset, pressing it into Noah's hands.

"You are...  You are The Creator now, Noah.  And now...  Now you must decide: can this destruction be averted?" Noah's father's eternally furrowed brow loosened, for once.

"...No," Noah said.

"Goodbye, then, my son," and his father was suddenly seized by paroxysms, arms and legs flailing, the sound of a hospital flatline as the massive heart attack took him.

"No, father, no!  I am a Genius!  I am God now!  I can save you!  I can save you!" Noah's tic-tac boxes filled with medication and Noah poured them into his father's mouth, but they had no effect.  Noah fastened his golden VR headset and commanded trillions of the tiny hypersonic ants into his father's mouth.  Arterial plaque and black cancer-rot were pulled, squeezed from his father's tissues like squid ink from a sponge.  Urate crystals popped from his father's arthritis-afflicted joints, cataract milk spilling from his eyes.  But still, his father lay dead.

"No!" Noah screamed, forcing the tiny legions of machines into his father's every vessel, nerve and pore.  Replacing the outdated tissues, cell-by-cell.  Tearing the very skin from his father's face to reveal the sinew and bone, replacing it with alabaster white skin, the eyes with terapixel, tetrachromat cameras, the brain with a neon blue cyborg's, digital and superhuman.

Still, his father did not wake, but lay there, still as death.  Noah threw the golden helmet to the ground, fell over his father's chest and cried, and cried and cried.

***
†ƒ
Noah's phone ass-buzzed him out of the dream.

And he awoke, to find that he was dressed like Tom Haverford, half-naked in a mag-lev Jacuzzi surrounded by supermodel cosplayers of Chun Li and Psylocke.

Wait, wait... Déjà  vu- I've had this dream before.  Is this a dream-within-a-dream, like some Inception thing?

Noah slapped himself.  And it hurt like a mutherfucker!  "Son of a bitch!"  He looked over, and touched the supermodel.  She was soft, half naked, and definitely real.  The Jacuzzi bubbles were definitely real, and the monster hangover Noah suddenly felt pounding like a jackhammer in his brain was way too goddamn real.  There were expensive-looking alcohol containers and designer clothes and passed-out hot people littering the penthouse suite Noah was in.

(Continue in next post)

[SilverSpook]

(Part 3)

"What the fuck...  What happened last night?"  Noah's legs felt kind of numb and super-wrinkly coming out of the Jacuzzi water.  His phone ass-buzzed him again, and he pulled it out to discover his phone had been replaced by a gold-plated, apparently waterproof, sci-fi communicator from The Expanse.  No last-last-gen cracked Android phone.  But his unlock pattern still worked?

@TheRealXina: "What.  The.  FUCK.  Noah??"

It was his girlfriend.  What was she pissed about now?  Was she still mad about Noah not showing up for the Democratic caucus thing?  Was it- and Noah looked over at the supermodel, with the two buns with the emerald cranes in them, and the realization came like a ton of bricks.

"Oh.  FUCK."  Noah's legs gave out and he splashed back into the bubbly fluorescent-illuminated water.

"I just..." Xina's next text was an Instagram photoset that had several HUNDRED thousand likes, reblogs, retweets, and probably had founded a few internet-PR companies by now.  The first Noah recalled; him in the Lexus limo, arm around Jenna and Sheila, holding the bottle of 1888 Samalens Vieille Relique.  The next was from the Ted Talk, of the three of them with Clooney.  Then there was them doing shots at some exclusive-looking party, and then again, at a different party, and a baboon and a banana was involved.   Then the clothes started coming off and things started getting X-Rated from there on in.  James had gone full-trans op, even downstairs, and there was photo -- animated gif -- evidence of Noah proving it.  In multiple positions.  With Sheila joining in.

@DatNoahTho: "OMG...  I don't know what to say.  I'm so sorry." Noah's inner-Ryan Gosling broke trying to spin an apology for what he'd done.

@Xina: "You're a fucking... How could you!?  You know what I can't have this moment with you in 140 character snippets, fucking call me!" Noah did.

"Look, there's nothing that can excuse what I did.  I-" Noah started.

"I was already pissed about you 'opting out' of your political duty.  But then you go out to your 'big important tech conference', mutate into some giant fucking DOUCHEY ONE PERCENTER sell-out, and fuck a bunch of trashy gold-digging SLUTS on the town!?"

"Ok, you're right to be mad, but hey, James- I mean Jenna is a friend, not a gold-digging slut."

"Oh, this is classic.  Right, my mistake.  You're the one sucking your 'friend's shemale cock to climb the ladder, and get ahead in the 'technology' world, right?  That sound about right?"

"Jesus Christ!  I made a mistake, ok!?  I mean, what the fuck?  I've been slaving my ass away living in the ghetto with my mom trying to get off the ground for like a decade, I finally get a chance for a big break, and you just want me to come 'caucus' for some 70-year old liberal pipe-dream that will never get in office?  It's like you just want me to be your cute little millennial-nerd, 'nice guy' boyfriend who does ok but is not *too successful* and goes on cute dates with you forever and ever," Noah stood up got out of the Jacuzzi and started stomping around, not even bother to cover up his swinging penis.

"Well guess what?  Now I'M in charge.  I'M coming up in the world.  I'M the FUCKING MAN now."

"Wow... Just...  Wow.  Ok.  That's a lot of bullshit right there, but I guess I see who you really were all along.  I completely misjudged you.  I guess I'll be going now," Noah thought he heard the sound of sobs starting just before the phone hung up.

"YEAH YOU BETTER FUCKING BE GOING!" Noah threw the golden future-phone across the room but it didn't shatter, it just bounced off one of the giant crystal glass panes.

***

Noah did come the fuck up.  Exponentially fast.

Noah found himself rolling up, as Jenna had, in a limo, into San Fran, scouting for the most promising talent, giving them a lottery ticket out of the street.  He felt bad about ripping Lego Robot Boy's idea and found out his name was 'Greg', and gave him a corner office in the old energy plant that Noah had bought and converted into his headquarters, that he titled, "Noah's Ark".  It wasn't quite the size of the Googleplex, but Noah had just started building. 

He went to all the biggest conferences, not only in San Fran but worldwide, in his new Gulfstream, often times with Jenna in the mile-high-club.  They never really became 'girlfriend and boyfriend', in the way that Noah was with Xina, and he missed it sometimes.  It was a business arrangement, and at one point, Noah actually married Jenna (technically, a Vegas Justice-of-the-Peace did the ceremony) for about eight months, just to keep their names and businesses at the top of the #trending topic list and the paparazzi drones chasing them.   They were never really in love, Noah would later admit on Oprah.

Noah's HomeSweetHome concept, with the blessing of Silicon Valley insiders, blew up faster than and all the other sharing economy ventures put together. 
Eventually, as Noah's HomeSweetHome cornered the real estate market the way Uber took ride-sharing, he upped the cut and hit a valuation of $100 billion in the first year.  From there, Noah branched out by creating a 'Technology Company' called Ark Tech, getting into everything from self-driving vehicles to cybernetics to construction-bots to humanoid servants and all fields of AI.  The 'Big Five' tech companies, having hit the top of their S-Curve and beginning to slow down, were caught off guard, the way Apple snuck up and bit Microsoft's market-share in the ass.  Eventually the Big Five became the Big Four.  The Big Four had a hostile takeover and became the Big Three.  Someone suffered an antitrust suit and then it was the Big Two.  (Ark Tech had all the best lawyers and senators and congressmen bought and paid for so they dodged that bullet).  Then, Ark Tech took out the other Tech Giant's Achilles heel by basically taking ownership of them through a byzantine web of shell-companies and subsidiaries and strategic board member placements.  Ark Tech kept them around, the way Microsoft kept Apple around in the 90's, just to fend off any potential Trust-busting allegations, though.


Noah stood, looking out over his empire, across the vast Californian sprawl.  He adjusted his million-dollar suit, and headed for the gigantic depolarizing glass window that auto-tinted.  A World Trade-and-a-half worth of stories below there were a million perma-unemployed teachers and firebomb-lobbing construction workers staging rallies and protests.  A confetti of ants, distant and abstract as the addresses, credit cards, medical histories of a billion customers.  Six billion customers, to be exact.  Distant digits, code. 

Noah could implement three strings of program logic, and like a magic wand, all the white-colored dots down there would cease to have employment as general practitioners.  With a word to Ark Tech's cybernetics subsidiary and a Pentagon dinner, Noah could roll out whole fleets of humanoid 'Terminator' bots -- which he did, and they fired off (mostly) non-lethal tear gas and microwave active-denial guns at the protesters. 

The protests, here and at state and federal capitols were all futile, of course.  By this time, no politician lifted a finger, breathed, without one of Noah's hundreds of thousands of lobbyists tugging on a money-colored leash.  Never mind the fact that Noah was tracking every keystroke, driving record, bathroom visit, blood pressure change and eyeball-focal point through his Internet of spying Things -- the smart car talking to the smart watch talking to your smart oven talking to Noah's Data Leviathans, buried somewhere in Antarctica.

Across the way, the new Clinton-Bush building was being constructed.  The segmented chrome of the construction bots snaked up skyscraping girders, erecting the skeleton of rebar ten times faster than any human crew.  Modular swarms of quad-drones screwed bars together, airlifted glass panes in place, working together like so many bees on a honeycomb.  Humanity had been the Atlas, holding up the world.  But now, the Anthropocene was over, and the Cybercene had begun.  Machines now carried civilization on their shoulders.  Never wanting of sick pay, never striking, never burning productivity on Facebook or having inconvenient talent-wasters like pregnancies and families.   

You can't save everyone.

I have built my Ark, and it is I who chooses.

Noah could choose to let you on, or he could choose to let you drown in the chaos and the jobless, welfareless, slumsprawl, rot as one of the brown confetti of ants below.  The Berlin-branch's cosmophysics wonks had assured Noah that mass-stratospheric levitation would be fully operational in the year.  With the latest advances in nanotech capable of turning garbage into anything from jewelry to advanced electronics, the 1% would never need to touch the Earth again.  The Skylands were coming, the great Arks rising above the flood of inequality and environmental destruciton.  The people below screamed up at Noah, demanding a place in Noah's Ark. 

I've seen this before... I've seen it.  The Dream?

It was a vague and fleeting memory, but Noah recalled it, so many years ago.  So long ago it seemed like aeons.  Antediluvian.

The rain of ones and zeroes.  The rising of the floodwaters through the city.  His father, dying, a prisoner of his own flesh.

I couldn't save everyone. 

Noah did save the people he personally wanted to, though.  Noah took a crystalline elevator up to see his mother.  She was in a robotic intensive care unit mere yards from his executive quarters, so that if she ever awoke from her stroke-induced coma, Noah would be there for her.  The hypersonic ants were flowing through her, now.  Attempting to heal her body, one cell at a time.  They might replace the cells, given a few more fiscal quarters-worth of breakthrough.

Taking the jeweled elevator down, he passed a massive nerd-Elysium, a resort for those Noah deemed 'Genius' enough to be 'worthy' of saving on intellectual merits.  The best and brightest technologists, scientists, thinkers.  They were free to enjoy endless streams of tech toys, protean-transhuman sexbots, endless parties and video gaming competitions and cosplay conventions, all the robot-bartended alcoholic drinks they could ever want, including 1888 Samalens Vieille Relique.  Noah was sure to have at least two of the brightest minds in each field at each one of his global Ark sites.

Two giraffes, two cockateils, two pythons.

Noah descended to the ground floor and looked out at the chaos.   There were cars on fire everywhere, hordes of people beaten back by huge four-armed mech-warriors that Noah called his, 'Nephilim'.  Between them neckless androids with riot shields, the successors to the African American bodyguard Noah had first encountered in Jenna's limo fired gas grenades and rubber bullets into the crowd.  Outside it had begun to rain, torrential, justice as it had in Noah's dream.  A protester had managed to score a hit on one of Noah's Ark's windows with a rock.  Noah strolled over, picking up a shard of shattered glass. 

He accidentally cut his finger, flipping the glass over.  And Noah was reminded of a simpler -- if rougher -- time.  Remembered being buzzed in the ass, in a shit studio apartment in a Micronesian Ghetto.  Remembered his cracking his phone and wondering if he could finagle a free one from the Obamacare signup.  He remembered seeing Michael Moore's 'Where To Invade Next' at the theater, and walking out it pissed as hell, losing his phone and having Xina interrupt her ass-workout to go get it.

Xina.

Of all the people in the world he wanted to save, it was her, but he had never heard from her again, after their breakup, so many years ago.  The irony was, all the parties, all the drugs, all the science and technology and breakthroughs and all Noah's global Empire -- none of it would fill the hole that she'd left in him. 

All the fun and sex and tech and pharmaceuticals just weren't enough to give the heart something that it really needed.  Noah should've learned that lesson from his father.  Maybe I wasn't as genius as I thought.  Noah thought to himself.
Then Noah turned around, and just as he was about to go back into his glass elevator and go back to the top of his ark and order his machine military to 'wash away the rest of humanity', Noah felt the strong, sweaty arms around him.  The smell of aerobics instruction.

"I've missed you, Noah Crowe," said her voice.

"Xina?  How... Xina!"  Noah turned and hugged her to himself, certain he had passed out in his bed and was dreaming now.

"I figured out that you had me on your 'saved' list when the warbots ID'ed me and let me through.  I figured you might still have a soft spot for me," Noah touched her, slapped himself.  It hurt like a motherfucker.

"Oh!  Oh my God!  This is a dream come true.  I- I've been looking for you for so long, I-  I'm so sorry for what I said to you, that night.  I wasn't myself," Noah said, still doubting the reality of the situation.

"I know.  I know that now.  It took me a long time to forgive you, but I do, Noah.  I forgive you," Xina leaned up and kissed Noah, and it was like she'd never left.  Noah would've given up everything, his Ark, Ark Tech, the last decade of his life if he could just keep her there with him for another minute.

"I love you Noah," Xina said.

"I love you too!"

"-But there's a reason Russell Crowe didn't get that Academy Award.  You know?"

"What?"

Something exploded, and Noah's first thought was, "I didn't give the order to fire live ammunition yet!" Then he looked down and felt something wet felling the space in between himself and Xina.  It took him another five seconds to realize he'd been shot.

Noah's internal medical nanobots had already begun attempting to patch the whole, but a second later the opposite began occurring.  The hole began growing bigger.

"It took me years to figure out a way to permanently kill you, Noah.  Eventually I made contact with one of your Ark Tech employees.  Greg, his name was.  See, Greg wasn't very happy with the way you stole his construction bot idea and sold it as your own.  Even if you did give him a job later.  Greg was happy to give me the keys to your personal medical nanotech.  I programmed them from 'auto-heal' to 'auto-destruct' myself, though."

By this time, Noah had collapsed to the ground.  The reverse-engineered healing machines were devouring Noah's body cell-by-cell, and had already reached his lungs.  His breathing slowed.  Caught.

As the world began to grey-out, Noah pondered in his dying breaths the question that his Methuselah-Hopkins-father had asked Noah in his dream, "Can it not be averted?"  What if Noah had gone with Xina to the Democratic caucus that day, instead of getting in that limo?  Probably, someone else would've won the lottery ticket, someone else would've been on that red carpet and making the millions and becoming the Noah, forced to choose who to save.  Or maybe there was another way forward?  Maybe if Noah just kept the faith that everyone could be saved rather than focusing on just those closest to him, given democracy and community another chance, maybe all the destruction *could* have been averted?

Noah didn't know.  But as he whispered the secret doomsday-killswitch for his entire Ark Tech empire into his golden headset, effectively deactivating all of his defense bots.  The hordes of hungry, dirty teachers and construction workers and doctors crashed through Noah's megabank-sized nexus, lobbing their Molotov cocktails at his edifice, Noah figured perhaps he would give humanity a second chance. 

As the thunderclouds finally cleared and the sun came out, the last thing Noah saw was a beautiful rainbow -- a rainbow refracted in a hail of shattered glass as the walls of his ark caved to the onslaught of democracy.

[Danvzare]

Wow, I finally read through that monster of a story.
And in short, there was way too much filler for my taste. Not description filler thankfully, but still filler none the less.

An overall good story though, and very well written, with just the right amount of mind-f**kery.
So yeah, thanks for the read.

By the way, I loved the symbolism in how you named things. Noah and the Ark, brilliant.

[Baron]

Sorry for the delay in voting.  That's what happens when I have to be host in the depths of a Canadian winter.   So let's close this competition already!

Our entrants are:

Danvzare with It was a Beautiful Summer Morning
Sinitrena with Blue, Blue, Blue is All My Food
Sane Co. with A Funny Story
Mandle with Over the Spring Holidays
SilverSpook with The Ark

You may vote for as many people as you think deserving per category: the more the merrier, I always say.  Your categories are:

Best Character: the most believable/captivating/magnetic/unique character
Setting: the most vivid background world, or most gripping atmosphere
Plot: the best organized, coherent and well-executed story with appropriate pacing, climax, etc.
Word Choice: the technical art of combining words in a memorable way
Random Event: the most creative or weirdest or most random event around which the story is built.

Voting starts now and runs until Sunday April 17, with tabulations & trophies to follow whenever I can get to my computer on Monday.  Good luck to all contestants!